It is often desirable to make an electrical connection or "jump" between adjacent terminal pins located on a printed wiring board or on a back plane of a piece of electrical equipment. Typically, the terminal pins are clustered together on 0.100" (0.254 cm) centers in high density arrangements which makes direct wiring on the two selected terminal pins difficult to achieve.
There presently exists connectors, called jumper plugs, specifically designed to make connections between two adjacent terminal pins by pressing the plug down onto the pins. Typical of these jumper plugs are the JUMP-JAX plug manufactured by the Sealectro Corporation of Mamaroneck, New York, and the Berg PV.TM. Jumper System manufactured by Berg Electronics of New Cumberland, Pennsylvania. However, both of these plugs contain intricate metal connector arrangements, either a copper ring or rectangular-shaped receptacles mounted within the plug housing, to achieve secure cross connection or jump connection between terminal pins. Because of these connector arrangements the plugs are more difficult to manufacture and, therefore, more costly to produce.
Specific objects of the present invention are to provide a low cost, easy to manufacture jumper plug having a simple metal cross connection arrangement capable of making a secure electrical cross connection between two adjacent terminal pins.